The Smolensk Archives, 1604–1611
The Smolensk Archives contain mainly documents concerning administration, originating from the governors’ chancellery in Smolensk during the Polish siege of 1609 to 1611. The major part of the documents is held at the Swedish National Archives (about 1,300 sheets), but a few hundred sheets of the same origin are kept in the archives of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The archive documents were taken by the Swedes as spoils of war in Poland in the middle of the 17th century. Subsequently, the collection was kept at Skokloster Castle in Sweden until it was transferred to the Swedish National Archives in 1893 together with Skoklostersamlingen. The Russian historian Sergej Vasil’evič Solov’ev visited Skokloster in the 1830s, and he brought a large number of documents from the Smolensk collection from Sweden to St. Petersburg. As early as in 1841, a large proportion of this material was published in Akty istoričeskie. Some seventy years later, in 1912, the Russian historian Jurij Got’e published a text edition of documents from the Swedish National Archives’ collection: "Pamjatniki oborony Smolenska 1609–1611". However, a considerable part of the collection remained unpublished.
The data base "The Smolensk Archives, 1604–1611" contains 847 records and recreates in digital form the original collection of documents from Smolensk at Skokloster Castle. It is possible to search for year, date, contents (in English and in Russian), personal names. Scanned copies of the documents at the National Archives are available. There are no scanned copies of the documents kept in St. Petersburg, but as a rule their texts are transcribed in their entirety in the database records.
Further information can be found in the menu to the left: indices (personal names, geographical names, monasteries and convents, churches), glossary and principles for the organisation of the entries in the catalogue.